Monthly Archives: September 2013

I recently bought the pdf of Fantasy Chess, a game which adds simple RPG-like elements, such as hit points, rolling to hit and healing, to chess.

This is an idea that’s appealed to me for a long time, possibly fueled by the book The Chessmen of Mars and the old computer game Battle Chess (although Battle Chess is actually just normal chess with cool animations).

Anyway Fantasy Chess does a good job in my opinion, although I changed some of the rules to make it easier (specifically the rules about carrying other pieces). The actual pdf looks quite amateurish, but the game is better than that suggests.

If you’re interested in playing this game, you need a bigger board for your pieces than for normal chess. This is because up to 6 pieces can be on the board at the same time. I was lucky in finding a single eBay auction which had a chess set and a larger-scale checkers set for sale.

I imagine that as one penetrated out from some enormous forest of the tropics, the wild beasts would become fewer, the gloom would lighten, and the horror of the place would slowly lift. Yet as one emerges nearer to the edge of London, and nearer to the beautiful influence of the hills, the houses become uglier, the streets viler, the gloom deepens, the errors of civilisation stand bare to the scorn of the fields.

Where ugliness reaches the height of its luxuriance, in the dense misery of the place, where one imagines the builder saying, “Here I culminate. Let us give thanks to Satan,” there is a bridge of yellow brick, and through it, as through some gate of filigree silver opening on fairyland, one passes into the country.